Pandemic montage interlude
"Still yearning for meaning"
When Gilgamesh heard this.
he looked at Enkidu and laughed:
”Look, my friend, how scared I am,
I am so scared I will not go! Bah!”— Gilgamesh, trans. Sophus Helle
Fall 2020.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The CEO of my email job suggests I quit.
He’ll even pay me to quit.
I’ve been working here for nearly five years without ever figuring out how to get much done. Call it ADHD, call it anxiety—my psychiatrist calls it both—but it is actually a relief to be told that the jig is up. In Office Space, getting paid without having to work feels at first like heaven; for me it feels like purgatory.
I wonder: Am I being too hard on myself?
As it turns out, I am not.
The CEO explains that, with budgets tightening, “We can no longer afford creative fellowships.”1
I agree to quit. Like LeBron taking his talents to Miami, I take my Creative Fellow-ship… away from… working. From having any job.
Understand, I’ve never gotten a severance before. I think I am rich forever. As a newly yet permanently rich person, I use my severance to pay for:
Two deluxe Bibles.
I was raised by atheists and am myself agnostic but I’d seen so many remarkable Bible quotes used as epigraphs by poets. What’s up with that old book? To find out, I impulsively Amazon the three-volume box set of Robert Alter’s new translation of the Old Testament, plus a gilded King James with full-color illustrations.2
Application fees for 26 MFA programs in creative writing.
I am rejected from 25 and get in off the waitlist at the program in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a place I know only as the involuntary sex-worker graveyard in the first season of True Detective.
A Dyson fan.
Handsome!
…
There’s no fourth item because at this point the severance is gone.
That and ten dollars will buy you a cup of coffee in the place you choose to live.
— My friend’s dad re: our podcast idea
Spring 2021. Williamsburg.
Two stimulus checks and a mental crisis later I am broke again.
My friend Austin says he can get me a job as a merchandiser at Scotts Miracle-Gro.
My sworn goal is never again to darken the door of an office. But the Scotts job is literally manual labor. Have I lost my mind? Wasn’t the purpose of my education to avoid this kind of thing? Didn’t my great-grandfather emigrate from Italy expressly to prevent this specific scenario?
It turns out to be the best job I’ve ever had. Austin and I get sweaty building displays of fertilizer and pesticides at Home Depots deep in Queens. We eat cheesesteaks. We talk shit and contemplate the universe in the Corollavirus, strangely happy to be stuck in traffic on the Kosciuszko Bridge.
Most importantly: no emails.
Fall 2021.
Lake Charles, Louisiana.
…
I’ll tell you when you’re older.
Summer 2022.
I am once again living in my parents’ basement in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I am, shall we say, uncomfortably comfortable.
My mom says I can stay as long as I want.
My dad says, “Are you thinking about working? [ever?] [again?]”
I am not.
I am starting a Substack.
I am emailing everyone I know.
Where this tends toward, no one can say.
— Daniel Boorstin
Fall 2022. Cincinnati.
I receive a Facebook message that is remarkable for not being spam.
A high school acquaintance has grown up to be a freelance reality-TV casting producer. She wants me and five of my college pals to audition via Zoom for a new team-based competition series. She keeps saying “CBS primetime” the same way my dad says “R1 research university.”
The show, Buddy Games, is something like Breakfast Club meets pickleball. Semi-athletic summer camp-style contests between dissimilar friend groups. The only requirement is an eagerness to be stereotyped.
Retired Wisconsin police officers who love bowling, for example. That’s one of the teams.
What team are we?
“Revenge of the Nerds.”
She reached out to me because Dartmouth is technically a member of the Ivy League, if only because they have yet to discover a legal way to remove us.
We would be, she cheerfully explains, underdogs. Easily underestimated due to 1. the perception of our poor athleticism and 2. the reality of our poor athleticism.
She is at pains to emphasize: some of the competitions will be mental, rather than physical, challenges.
Several of my best college friends agree to participate. I am going to be famous and my Substack is going to make me wealthy.
The majority of the team drops out the day before the Zoom audition when the contract is discovered to include insane language to the effect that CBS reserves the right to replace our faces, bodies, and voices with AI, without limitation.
The nerds, it seems, are big into reading.
I convince several college acquaintances to join the decimated team. We are scrappy. Two of them even played sports in college. We audition on Zoom, doing our best to resemble best friends.
Spring 2023. Still Ohio.
The Zoom audition fails.
If I don’t move out of my parents’ basement, I’ll never move out of my parents’ basement.
Austin says he can hire me for another summer of Scotts.
THAT MEANS WE’RE GOING BACK TO THE BIG APPLE, BABY.
And by we I mean me, AND BY ME I MEAN YOU, DEAR READER, IN OUR NEXT INSTALLMENT(S), Ishtar help me.
And please, Ishtar. Help me.3
In a similar context at this company I was previously told that I was a “culture fit.”
For the record, absolutely worth it. Minus the Amazon aspect. I regret that part given my current job and, Ethics.
Don’t ask me why I asked ChatGPT to summarize my own blog post but DO ask me what it SAID because here it IS—I find this, by turns, hilarious, terrifying, and STRANGELY MOVING:
Setting & Style:
A memoir-style, humorous, self-aware personal essay that traces the author’s meandering journey through unemployment, creative ambition, and various jobs post-layoff.
Major Themes:
Creative Displacement: The narrator is laid off from an "email job" (possibly a creative-adjacent role) due to being labeled a "creative fellow," which the company can no longer afford.
Search for Meaning: He uses his severance to buy deluxe Bibles and apply to 26 MFA programs — getting into only one, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Class Anxiety & Labor: Despite his liberal arts background and family history of upward mobility, he finds fulfillment doing manual labor for Scotts Miracle-Gro with his friend Austin.
Parental Expectations vs. Reality: Moves back into his parents’ basement, where one parent is supportive and the other skeptical about his work ethic.
Attempt at Reinvention: Tries starting a Substack and auditions for a CBS reality show called Buddy Games, under the team name “Revenge of the Nerds.”
Reality Check: Most friends drop out of the audition after reading a dystopian-sounding contract; the team bombs the Zoom audition anyway.
Cyclical Journey: After failure, the narrator prepares to return to New York City to work another summer with Austin at Scotts — hopeful, self-deprecating, and still yearning for meaning.